The Schwartz Cloud Report

Iron Mountain Exits Public Cloud Storage

Iron Mountain is shutting down its public cloud storage services Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform, market researcher Gartner reported in a research note last week, making it the third company to make an exit over the past year.

Startup Vaultscape shut down last year, and EMC's Atmos Online also went offline last year, Gartner noted. "To date, public cloud storage IaaS has had a modest level of adoption," according to the research note. "Not incidentally, all three service providers' go-to-market strategies focused purely on cloud storage unaccompanied by any cloud compute services."

In a statement, Iron Mountain confirmed that it is shutting down the two services. "Iron Mountain did recently notify customers of our Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform that we are retiring these two commodity cloud-storage solutions," the company said.

"This decision only affects those using Virtual File Store, a low-cost cloud storage option for inactive files, and technology partners who use the Archive Service Platform as a general-purpose cloud for storing their customers' data," the statement continued. "As the Gartner report notes, public cloud service offerings like these have seen modest levels of adoption."

While the company stopped taking orders for the services as of April 1, they won't be retired before the first half of 2013. Iron Mountain will transfer Virtual File Store customers to its higher-value File System Archiving (FSA) service next year, a hybrid service that uses policy-based archiving of data both on-site and in the cloud. There is no migration path for Archive Service Platform customers.